Someone cloned our app and made it to the top of Product Hunt.

Hey Chris, I was a fan of Copysmith before but after reading this I'm pretty appalled at them.
To be honest, that's life and people have been copying each other for ages. But it still sucks since I've also been in your position of competitors copying us. It also sounds like you've been through a lot on top of all this.
Not sure how I could help, but calling out the makers in public like this is something I do support.

Also, Copysmith are undeniably fast builders - really trying to spread the word about themselves through ads, AppSumo, etc. I'm not sure if you're a solo founder, but hiring engineers and building faster can help you recover quicker.

There is a first mover advantage, but at this point, don't worry about the competition, just focus on your users and snazzy.ai.
After all, most startups die from suicide not murder.

they and the initial success they got has validated your idea. and you've got it off your chest here - rightly so.

so now learn from it and crack on with your plans. do not be deterred by muppets - they are everywhere we look.

first mover whatevs! means nuffin'. assuming you weren't in this for a quick 2 week wonder, then its how you execute over the next 12 months that matters.

we really cannot worry about competitors at this stage, apart from to keep a track from the corner of your eye. and of course learn from any features you see that might be a good fit in your roadmap too - if that is copying then everyone of us is guilty ;-)

There's a quote I like from a book called Inspired

Bad product teams focus on competition, good product teams on their customer

I get that it's frustrating but at the end of the day there's nothing that you can do except be better than them.

A team that only copies can only rarely be as good as one that has a true purpose behind what they're doing.

Just a question how bad you want it 😏

If you do something good, they will copy you. That is how life works and that reaffirms that you are doing a great job. It also happened to me around 2 years ago, they copied my product word by word, copy/paste from the landing page.

My recommendation, ignore them and continue your path, if you believe in your product, you will succeed and they will not, as you were the first one who got the idea and they just copied you. You will always be ahead of them. At least this has worked for me.

Sorry to hear, Chris. Regardless, your homepage looks fantastic - congrats on the launch and your newborn!

Don't worry! Your product looks great. Really amazed at the quality. Nice design too.

Wow, write a complaint about her product and on her name too. You have all to win this. One thing is competing on the market and some tools. But having the same UI UX tools and new features is too much.

It’s a hard to take compliment, as long as they keep copying you they will never be ahead. If this is where your heart is you will be better, because deep down you are.

First spend time with your newborn (congrats man!!!) and after that go kick their ass.

Just remember all of the apps that are “The Tinder for ...”, they have to use another companies proposition to make theirs clear. That’s a god damn compliment imo.

Good luck! Keep ya head up.

This is utterly frustrating and painful Chris. I saw your original PH comment when Copysmith launched and it felt like an awful situation, and it still feels like one to see how much it hurt.

But cold shower moment...

I don't think you should try to win this argument.

If you spend your energy (and happiness) on this now-old fight, it might win you a few supportive fans, but the majority are like any mob and will go with the one who looks most like the leader.

Because the mainstream just wants their problem solved.

In that sense, Copysmith are demonstrating their commitment to solving it: they're getting you all the features you need (however morally bankrupt), they're making marketing noise and so our brains think "they'll still be around in a few months, they're safe to invest my time in".

I get this is easier said than done! Especially when they keep copying, it'll keep aggravating this wound. But the best salve will be Snazzy winning, and I think that comes from looking forward to the bigger landscape of opportunities. To the fresh, fertile ground of battles to come.

So how might Snazzy demonstrate leadership?

• I suspect their PH did better because they were first. For a crowd with the problem, the solution was shocking. But even though that crowd is now harder to shock, there's plenty of others. @royledoyle launched Magic Sales Bot to great success, just by applying the same idea to a slightly different problem. Suddenly a new (not yet jaded) demographic gets the first time 'wow!'.
• Like @amandaz said, do what you've got to do to keep feature parity/leadership. Let the market see you're a player they can invest their time in.
• When you've got a little forward momentum, find a journalist who might cover the fight and hand over the evidence. It's a good salacious story. Use it as a PR bump (but only a small one). It might also be cathartic.
• You've got an app that writes for you, use it! Get into (AI written) cold emails to find customers, when one lands, use their newly-created marketing copy as a case study and then hit every journalist you can to pitch the new trend of 'GPT-3 written marketing'. (And for good measure, later follow up with a PR pitch for 'How did one man win so many customers? With GPT-3 written emails')

That sucks. But it also gives me hope that there is always opportunity in a field even if there is already someone building a product for it. You just have to be quicker and better at marketing.

I’m building FriendTime and the v1 I launched 2 years ago had like 4 competitors. Now I found 21 competitors. Still think its a good idea though

But yeah, It sucks if they copy you like that

This is something I am quite scared of. I have got a great idea (at least I think there will be enough users) but I am scared of being copied. I want to launch a private beta, then a public beta, and then do a PH launch but I am just scared someone would make something similar (and maybe better because I can only give about 2 hours of my time every day because I have school and studies). Now, a better product is better for the user but it was my idea and an idea is what makes the product stand out in most cases.

So what does one do when their idea gets copied?

I know how you feel.

Yoast has been placing people on our email lists also and copying our colors, tried to make their ex-logo go from a wierd orange to one that uses our colors and our color code, then they stole our copy one to one in different years.

All in all, they tried to drown us by copying:

• logo
• language
• features

they couldn't copy the features, because they're not that good, so instead they pretended to offer the same level of quality and also the features that we offer, even though they don't.

It's tough when you've got competitors like these.

Let's not talk about RankMath who have been spamming our sites with fake links and fake traffic. People on reddit however are starting to notice that RM is really bad at business and only create fake accounts that spam people https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/neioy2/thoughts_on_seo_plugins_yeost_vs_rankmath_vs/

First: exposure is what wins. Second: exposure is what wins. Features, engineering, stack--that's not what wins, despite what engineers love to think. And if it seems to be winning, engineers, ask yourself if it's winning enough (answer: almost certainly not).
Ok. Build exposure by tweeting and blogging about this: what you learned, what you felt. Appeal to moral authority--folks we can't let stuff like this happen in our community or it will kill it. Write thoughtful posts about the choices you made in design, etc., with an eye toward how you do a great job helping users. Add quotes. Buy ads (Google, FB, whatever) on Copysmith keywords. Report them to everyone. Google, FB, etc. reach out to tech bloggers pitching them on a story about how apps get copied--not yours, but as one of a group the journo may have heard about. Try traditional journalism too. HARO is a place to look.
What you are trying to do is a) discourage this behavior b)enlist allies c) make it too expensive for them to operate.
Enlisting allies is your best weapon, and will also help with the exposure problem. Although I am not recommending anything, I have heard that in cases like this sometimes powerful or influential people reach out privately wanting to know names. I have heard that revealing the name to such people often has odd, unpleasant effects on the name's future endeavors, especially if the name is trying to get funding. You should know as many such powerful people as possible: even reaching out about funding can uncover lots of material via Google that you have prepared for them.
This approach is a fair amount of work. It's worth every second of effort. For a case study, Google Golden Bell Studios and get about halfway down the first page of results.

I just looked at the comments on the AppSumo deal. Why didn't you or anyone else call them out on it? Maybe you did and the comment wasn't approved.

That's really disappointing. So sorry for you, Chris. In better news, Snazzy.ai is picking up speed. I'm loving your emails about new features. I get excited every time.

Hey Chris,

Your experience sucks but I see multiple valuable lessons here:

• Product is one thing, marketing is another one. Apparently, the copycats were not good at coming up with fresh ideas but better at marketing.
• Trusting users sometimes backfires. But I'm confident on the long haul, it pays off. C'est la vie.

My 2 cents:

• Going to war against them is a waste of your time. You used to be the first mover, now you're the challenger. Accept your new role and use all the advantages! Go talk to their users, copy their best features, copy their SEO strategy, whatever they're doing good, now is your time to take.
• The market is very VERY large and there's room for both of you. I know this because I'm building exportator.com and I see how Western apps get copied everyday in emerging countries (because they are too expensive).
• To win you have to stay in the game long enough. You're allowed to take a break because you're annoyed at this questionable behavior. But you decide if you get out of this stronger or sour.

Bon courage! as we say in France

Frustrating scenario. There is a definite advantage to being first to market, especially if they get to hit the bigger media outlets. I can tell from my own, not as serious experience - if they hit the media first it will be like a snowball and nobody will look into a second product that solves a similar problem for a while. You can only catch up once this becomes a bigger market and people start looking for alternatives to the project that was first to market. Then you can beat them with pricing, features, support etc. Just my two cents.

I had a similar (although much, much less serious) experience recently. I noticed a mention of a competing app on Twitter, so I clicked and took a look at their web pages. I was surprised to find a number of their features named exactly like features in my app. It was very clear, because I had to do quite a bit of thinking to invent names for those things. While not a "copy", it's clear that the competitor was "inspired" by many things I did.

I found this very frustrating and actually asked (nicely) the other founder to please seek inspiration elsewhere. I don't mind competition, but I would really like everyone to go their own way and design their own software themselves.

Then I realized that this is just how the world works. Some people will invent, other people will copy. And there are more copycats than inventors. I guess we just have to live with it and move forward: be quicker, build better software, provide better support.

I feel really sorry every time when I hear such stories. But you have to fight back. If you are 100% sure they stole your everything why wouldn't you comment it on PH and wouldn't show the proofs? Or you could do it differently - send the thefts email explaining your steps you will take that will ruin their reputation. People are usually more sensitive to such things.

I know, this sounds really nasty but at least this way to fight is open and honest unlike theirs.

Good luck.